Narcissist's Alien Sexuality: Cerebral, Somatic, and In-between (Compilation)

Finally, the cerebral narcissist is really left alone by everyone, with no secondary sources of narcissistic supply at his disposal.

And so in his quest to find new sources, he again embarks on ego-mending bouts of sex, followed by the selection of a spouse or a mate of secondary source of supply. And then the cycle starts all over again. A sharp drop in sexual activity, emotional absence, cruel detachment, leading to abandonment, leading to hypersexuality, etc.

The cerebral narcissist is mostly sexually loyal to his spouses, he is faithful. He alternates between what appears to be hypersexuality and asexuality, which is really forcefully repressed sexuality.

The second phase, when he is asexual, he feels no sexual urges consciously, except maybe for the most basic, which drive him to masturbation.

The cerebral narcissist, therefore, is not compelled to cheat on his mate, to betray her, to violate his marital vows.

The cerebral narcissist is much more interested in preventing a worrisome dwindling of the kind of narcissistic supply that really matters.

Sex, he says to himself, contentedly, is for those who can do no better.

I'm Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited.

The psychosexuality of all types of narcissists, cerebral and somatic alike, involves the objectification and interchangeability of intimate partners.

Narcissists are polyamorous, they are auto-erotic. Quite a few of them have comorbid sexual paraphilias. In other words, they are sexually libidinal.

The cerebral narcissist aims to stabilize the flow of narcissistic supply by suppressing his sexual predilections and orientation, and thus by rendering himself asexual.

The somatic narcissist, on the other hand, aims to secure an uninterrupted flow of narcissistic supply by indulging his sexual preferences with multiple partners.

The cerebral narcissist relies on his source of secondary narcissistic supply, in other words, normally on his spouse, to regulate his supply and to compensate for the inevitable fluctuations in both quantity and quality of primary supply.

But few spouses would willingly participate in threesomes, swinging orgies, and group sex, towards which, the cerebral narcissist and the somatic narcissist, naturally gravitate.

So the cerebral narcissist is forced to sacrifice his sexuality, to ensure the longevity of his gratifying and exclusive relationship with his source of secondary supply, with his spouse.

If he discloses his sexuality, if he acts on it, he is likely to lose his spouse.

His marriage gradually becomes sexless, without sex, devoid of any sexual overtones, undertones, let alone activities.

To compensate for this glaring lack, the cerebral narcissist turns unto himself. He becomes auto-erotic. He fantasizes as he masturbates with varying frequency. His sex life is reduced to the consumption of pornography and role-playing in online forums dedicated to such things.

But this, of course, is a dreary substitute for a full-fledged sex life. And it's not satisfying.

So as frustration mounts in both members of the couple, so do aggression and hostility. There is a sense of waste and dysphoria, depression.

But the cerebral narcissist would rather hurt his mate by withholding sex from her than lose her altogether, which would be the ineluctable consequence of him being true to his sexual self.

The question arises, why doesn't the cerebral narcissist team up with an intimate partner who does share his inclinations and who would be happy to act on his fantasies?

The answer is because such a partner cannot be relied on to be faithful, constant and consistent.

And this is the cerebral narcissists predicament.

Intimate partners who are compatible with his sexual urges and fantasies are useless as stable long-term sources of secondary supply. They are bound to be unfaithful. They are bound to disappear on him.

Intimate partners who can be relied to provide secondary narcissistic supply, on a regular basis, are likely to be sexually incompatible with the cerebral narcissist's desires, urges, sexual wishes and fantasies.

This stratagem, of course, is self-defeating.

The cerebral narcissist's partner ultimately does abandon him, starved as she is for sex and intimacy, and resentful of being the target of his repeated pent-up aggression.

As far as the cerebral narcissist is concerned, being abandoned also serves as a kind of masochistic self-punishment.

So narcissistic supply and sexuality are inversely related in the cerebral narcissist's mind. He can have either or, but not both.

When narcissistic supply, primary or secondary, is low, he resorts to rampant sex as he hunts for his next stable source of narcissistic supply and as he seeks to make up for lost time.

When the flow of supply has been reconstituted, the cerebral narcissist reverts almost immediately, and automatically, to his sexual hibernation.

To the cerebral narcissist, the sex act constitutes low-grade narcissistic supply, a mere stopgap measure, and a necessary evil in the capture and captivation of his future intimate partner.

The somatic narcissist is simply the mirror image of his cerebral brother.

To the somatic narcissist, sex, sexual prowess, carnal exploits, and a string of conquests, sex is narcissistic supply.

The somatic narcissistic sexuality, however, nonconformist or even deviant, is the only stable ground of the narcissistic supply that he needs to regulate his sense of self-worth.

The somatic narcissist actually seeks out and selects partners who are labile, volatile, erratic, fleeting, adventurous and unstable, as he switches between multiple sexual objects of infatuation.

Somatic flaunts his sexuality and thus knowingly gives up on a stable long-lasting long-term relationship.

My name is Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited.

Recently I have received an interesting letter from a cerebral narcissist. He wrote this to me, quote, I guess I'm a throwback to the men of the 18th or 19th century. I am patriarchal. I am transactional. I have had several serious relationships, including one engagement to be married, and three marriages. The pattern had always been the same.

Having selected a woman far inferior to my position in life and thus less likely to abandon sheep, and following a brief period of rampant sex, to demonstrate her that that un-normal and to make her look forward to years of great physical and emotional intimacy, false advertising if there ever was one, well, following this period of courtship, I subside into this recluse, interested only in my studies, reading, writing, and the universe of the mind. Zero-sex, no love, no intimacy, physical, emotional, no children, no home, always lived in rental flats, and no family. It's a take it or leave it proposition. It entails minimum nuisance value.

So why did I get married? What are the roles of my intimate partner?

One, to admire me.

Two, to remind me of my past accomplishments and glory.

Three, to act as a glorified housemate and do the chores.

Four, to serve as my companion, available on the spare of a moment to do my bidding and adhere to my plans and decisions.

And five, to reflect well on me by not shaming me in public with their ignorance, promiscuity or idleness.

The cerebral narcissist continues. As long as she fulfilled the aforementioned functions, I didn't really care what else she did with her time and with whom.

Nothing stirred in me, not even a hint of jealousy, when all my women told me that they had cheated with me with other men, some of them multiple.

But when they showed clear signs of bolting, when they became disenchanted, bitterly disappointed, disaffected, disillusioned, cold, aloof, wary, demonstrably absent. When they lost all interested me in my work, verbally and psychologically abuse me, and refused to do things together anymore, then I panicked because I was afraid to lose their valued services.

The thing is, I dreaded the time, effort and resources required to break in, to train and domesticate and abet another woman, to my highly special needs and particular requirements.

I was also tired of having my women of scorn with half my assets time and again.

After all, I married them only in order to secure their presence in my life, and I did provide them with a lifestyle that they could never have attained by themselves inferior as they were to stack with them.

So faced with such a daunting prospect of being abandoned, I embarked on a charm offensive, and I again offered them sex, intimacy, love, attention, and if needed, adulation.

Unusually at this stage, it was too late, definitely too little. She was already far gone. She bolted all the same.

All my women felt that something was wrong with me, something was missing in the relationships such as it was, but they couldn't quite place their collective finger on it.

I simply absented myself because I regarded full-fledged intimate relationships as both a colossal waste of my precious time and the manifestation of socially sanctioned mediocrity.

There had always been a discrepancy in expectations which led to inevitable break-ups and acrimony, concludes the unrepentant cerebral narcissist.

Now, how we're trying to get the difference the cerebral and the somatic, narcissistic sexuality, I'd say to tell them to me, why it's true the cerebral narcissist and the somatic sexual is. How and what is the foray motto? What can't do? especially the cerebral narcissist and the somatic sexual.

How and what is the foray motto?

What can't tending, it's a bel sue, or cusueh inhershatation in fact in nows, I'm experience, the asexualized, cerebral narcissisticist, one-st, kuzde-le-le-le-le-mig-l-the-foyance-en-the-foyance-and-a-vis, and, and, a sort of, a different-segette, abutha-tudatot, with as-al, that not sexual-is-exualish art-keres?

Oyes, like, the tantra-in, the un-mectarstatt-as and the sexual-energy sublimation?

like the like tantra, the on the undertartostation and the sexual energy sublimatash?

These are very interesting questions.

The cerebrals' asexuality starts as an accident in effect.

The cerebral focuses on his intellectual endowments, on his ability to analyze things, on his synoptic view of things, on his ability to synthesize, various insights.

And he discovers, early on as a child, that his intellect or his intelligence gets him attention, garners attention, especially from adults, which is very gratifying to the child.

He even discovers that his intellect gives him power over adults, respect, all, and so on.

This is an irresistible proposition, almost a drug, which the child cannot resist.

Remember that narcissists gets fixated at that stage.

So it comes to be nine.

By age nine, he had discovered that his outstanding intellect gets him attention and other goodies from adults, and then he freezes.

He doesn't continue to develop and say, well, okay, it's only one dimension of life, there are other dimensions.

All this is missing.

He just froze at that second for the rest of his life.

And so the only lesson he gets from life is, if I use my intellect, I'm going to get attention, respect, obedience.

So this is a lesson and the only lesson he has.

Nothing can be no other function in no other in his life and no other dimension of his functioning can ever be as good or reach the level of his intelligence.

He cannot fix things at home on the level of his intelligence and he cannot have sex with someone, a woman or a man, nevermind, which will reach the levels of his intelligence.

The intelligence is so perfect, such a well-honed instrument, so brilliant, so pyrotechnic, so technical, so amazing, so peacocktail, that it's extremely difficult to match it.

So we have a tendency in life to repeat what we are good at and to avoid what we are not good at.

I keep telling people, for example, you fail all the time because you're very good at failing. You're an expert at failing.

We all do what we are good at, and if we fail all the time, we're very good at failing, and we will continue to do this, because we are a success at failing.

And so the same with the narcissist. He is very good at intellectual pursuits.

Why would he try anything else? He has no incentive, he has a disincentive to try anything else.

Because if he tries anything else, it will contrast very sharply with what he is good at.

So it starts like this. It starts by narcissists gravitating towards the preference of excellence.

Narcissists actually seeks excellence, which is a very good trait, you know.

But he is a radical. He is an extreme.

He seeks excellence but refuses to compromise.

So he goes through a process called constriction.

Constriction is when your life becomes more and more and more and more and more narrow, more constricted, more restricted, because you are a perfectionist, because you refuse to compromise, you refuse to accept the gray shades of the world. It's not black and white.

And this is called dichotomous thinking.

Now, the reason the narcissist has dichotomous thinking, he refuses to accept gray shades.

It's all everything good or bad, excellent or zero.

He has dichotomous thinking because he's stuck in childhood.

And children have something called splitting. Splitting is a defense mechanism.

And splitting is when we think of the world in black and white. Every person is totally good or totally bad. Every situation is totally acceptable, totally unacceptable. Or I am 100% at what I do, or I don't do it.

So this is splitting.

The narcissist splits all the time because he stuck as a child.

When we grow up and become adults, we don't split anymore. We realize people have some good sides, some bad sides. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad. I don't have to be perfect in sex. I can just enjoy it.

We stop splitting. We begin to see nuances of the world.

The narcissist doesn't have this.

So the cerebral narcissist, because he wants to be perfect, it also is a part of his grandiosity. He focuses only on intellect and neglects everything else. Not only sex. Everything else.

So he is, for example, not likely to have a family. For example. Or if he has a family, it would be a very dysfunctional family because he will not invest in the family.

Coming back to sex, that's how it begins.

Gradually the narcissist begins, looks around and he sees that he is a freak, that everyone is having sex and he is not having sex. That girls go after boys, but not after him.

And so he begins to feel left out. He begins to feel freakish. He begins to feel inferior and inadequate.

And this challenges his grandiosity.

To restore his grandiosity, the narcissist creates an ideology of sexlessness, ideology of sexlessness, which says only superior people don't need sex.

Sex is for vitals. Sex is for retails. Sex is for primitive people. Sex is animals have sex. You know? Sex is animalistic. And I'm well above that. My intellect took me away from all these great unwashed masses. You know, I don't belong to the masses.

But this is of course a layer, a layer of ideology that is intended to cover the discomfort and humiliation of being asexual in a totally sexualized environment, especially as a teenager.

And we call this entire situation cognitive dissonance. It's a cognitive dissonant reaction. You feel dissonance, you feel discomfort, you feel awfully, and then you use your cognition, using your thinking to create some story, some narrative, to make you feel good.

And the narcissist gets stuck with his story, the cerebral narcissist, gets stuck with his story for the rest of his life.

Gradually, he becomes proud or cathected, he becomes emotionally invested in this ideology, this story, he becomes proud of it, and he uses it, now he chooses a sexuality.

To begin with, he didn't choose it, but now he chooses it.

So even when he finds himself in situations where he can have sex, he's offered sex, and so on, he would reject it. And he would not feel bad about it, but he would feel proud.

He would feel that he had been tested and survived the test with flying colors. He had proved his metal. He had proved how strong he is, how superior he is, and he would even brag about it. He would even go and tell everyone. I was with this gorgeous girl, she took off her clothes. I told her, you know, leave me alone. And he would brag about it. And of course, like everything else, there are social structures which are narcissistic. Most religions are narcissistic.

So there are social structures, and these social structures adopted a sexuality as a form of, you know, so we find a sexuality in religion, which we can discuss later.

The cerebral narcissist, the somatic narcissist, a more than sexualist, because it's a good-lawful, more of the kipzellarer, it's more than to look at the theme-or, so on that they're perverzebbed or deviant or different from.

I prefer not to use words like pervert or deviant or weird because they imply judgment. I don't think, as I said, any practice between consenting adults that doesn't harm should never be judged.

And therefore I strongly object to words like perversion and so on.

But the first part of what you had said, I think is absolutely true.

Cerebral narcissists bring to the sex, when there is sex, when they're in the somatic phase, when the cerebral narcissist is in the somatic phase, he brings into the sex all his brain power, all his creativity, all his imagination, things he has heard and learned.

He is much better at combining elements. He is much better at providing synoptic view, so synthesizing, he is much better at pushing buttons in the right sequences.

So sex with the cerebral narcissist is much more multidimensional, much more exciting and much more addictive and much more interesting than with the somatic narcissist, which precisely is the problem.

When the cerebral narcissist is hunting for a woman, he becomes somatic.

And then the woman is exposed to this hyperdimensional, super arousing, exciting, technical, incredible sex, which is something she had never experienced before.

And she goes through emotions and arousal stages that she didn't know even existed. She's multi-orgasmic. I mean, most women describe this as a Disneyland, sexual Disneyland.

And that's precisely the problem.

The cerebral narcissist uses sex to capture the woman, to, I call it acquisition, to acquire the woman, to hoover, if you wish, the woman.

Sex is a form of drug that the cerebral narcissists gives the woman to make her addicted to him.

The minute she is, the sex stops.

And that is the source of the enormous frustration of partners of cerebral narcissists.

Most of them will tell you, wow, at the beginning the sex was wonderful. I don't know what happened. It suddenly stopped. It's always suddenly. It's abrupt.

At some point, the cerebral narcissist decides, this woman is mine, she is not likely to abandon me just because there's no sex, so he stops the sex. Sex is a chore, it's a maintenance thing, and it runs against these values, runs against his ideology, makes him feel low level primitive, makes him feel somatic, because he's somatic. He doesn't want to be somatic. Somatic is his recessive side, exactly like the feminine is his recessive side in a male narcissist, or masculine in the female narcissist.

We all have recessive sides which we suppress actively. We have been taught by society, by culture, that some dimensions of ourselves, some aspects, some parts of us, we should suppress.

Yes?

I'm a man, if I want to put lipstick, I will not. I will suppress it.

So cross-dressing is frowned upon. And so on.

The same with the cerebral narcissists. The somatic side is the repress, the recessive side, the side that he doesn't want to be, or that he believes he should not be, because he drags him down. It makes him common, makes him mediocre, makes him like everyone.

He's not like everyone. He's special, he's unique, he's God.

And he resents it. The cerebral resents the sex. He's very angry that he has to have sex. And he is even more angry that he loves it.

It's a dissonance, cognitive and emotional, severe, cognitive and emotional and axiological dissonance. Axiological means the values.

It's a series of multiple dissonances.

It's not that he doesn't enjoy sex. He loves, he adores sex. He gets addicted to sex. He absolutely can't stop.

But precisely what makes him very angry. And what creates this dissonance, and the only way to resolve the dissonance is to stop the sex.

So he waits. He waits until the second that he thinks it's safe to stop the sex.

Now of course in some of these relationships the other party wouldn't take it.

So either she lives or the relationship becomes open and the parties are allowed to have outside lovers or to outsource the sex.

So many, many cerebral narcissists have a don't ask, don't tell policy. Like, you know, the partner can find other lovers and just don't talk about it.

Many. And it's a solution, it's a functional solution, nothing wrong with it.

Possibly the partner finds in the cerebral narcissist many aspects which are positive, which she wants to stay with, and okay, the physical aspect, she is satisfied with other men.

It's a doable and practical and functional solution, but somewhere, always, there is pain.

Yes, I'm sexually satisfied with other men. I can travel and find other men, but why do I have to do this?

I can do this and it's a perfect solution and everything is okay. But why do I have to do this?

Because it's interpreted as rejection.

Never mind how many books she reads about cerebral narcissists and their psychology and psychodynamics and how the mother abused them. Never mind how many books she reads about cerebral narcissists and their psychology and psychodynamics and how the mother abused them.

Never mind.

Ultimately, it's perceived as rejection.

Here I am naked next to him in bed and he's reading a magazine. It's rejection. It's humiliating. It's ego shattering. it's destructive, it's horrible, horrible feeling.

And it pushes the partner of the cerebral narcissist to extreme behaviors like alcoholism, like, I don't know, dogging, like dating and having sex with strangers in hotel rooms.

I've seen the most crazy behaviors imaginable. It's the pain. The pain becomes intolerable.

And women internalize pain.

The woman doesn't say something's wrong with him. She says something wrong with me. He's not sleeping with me, not because he is fucked up. Something is wrong with me.

And so she wants to punish herself for having failed. Even it's not rational, not logical at all, but this is the feeling. So she wants to punish herself. So she wants to trash herself. She wants to, you know, she wants to be a slut. She wants to be, so she goes. She does horrible and dangerous and risky and reckless things, sexually speaking. I've seen this happen a lot.

And so it's not true that what's the problem? I mean, the cerebral doesn't want to have sex, let's have an open relationship and the woman can find other men and everything will be okay.

It's not true. She's operating out of pain and desperation and self-recrimination and guilt and shame and a feeling of inadequacy and of rejection. She's operating from the wrong motives and consequently she will find the wrong men in the wrong circumstances. And she will end up very often badly.

So that's why my absolute recommendation is no contact. Never mind what arrangement is offered and never mind how optically it looks like a solution. It's not a solution. It's not a solution. It's never a solution.

It's possible to have a relationship where the couple has sex and also with other people, like swinging or threesomes or group sex. That's possible. And that's much easier because the couple is having sex. But for variety, for novelty, for fun, they bring other people into the sex. That's much more benign situation.

It's not a situation with the Cerebell.

With Cerebral, there's no sex. It's not that they introduce the cerebral. With cerebral, there's no sex. It's not that they introduce a third party into the... There's no sex. It's utter and total rejection.

People identify their sexuality with who they are. If you offer me sex and I reject you, I'm not rejecting your sex, I'm rejecting you. That's how people perceive it. Of course it's wrong. Because maybe I reject your sex, but not your conversation.

But no, when people's sexuality is rejected, they feel instinctively, intuitively, that they had been rejected in their totality. And so it's total rejection.

Imagine day in, day out for years. It's destructive.